Crimes Against Horticulture: When Bad Taste Meets Power Tools 

Join nationally known garden writer and landscape architect Billy Goodnick as he unleashes his offbeat, shock-and-awe tactics to teach you how to create beautiful, useful, sustainable gardens. Starting with his rogue’s gallery of the bone-headed, disturbingly ugly, environmentally heinous things people do in the name of gardening, Billy shifts gears to explain the simple steps garden lovers can use to boost their own design skills.

 Billy has been called a “sneaky educator” – entertaining while delivering a useful and serious message about growing a greener garden that’s easy on the eyes and gentle on the planet. You’ll also learn to detect the early symptoms of Compulsive Raking Disorder and Saturday Morning Syndrome, the leading causes of Crimes Against Horticulture.

 After the presentation, Billy will give away free copies of Fine Gardening Magazine, where he writes his Design Workshop column, and for a few lucky, randomly chosen attendees, his Crimes Against Horticulture Crime Scene Investigation Kit.

REGISTRATION

$15 General Public; $10 Members; Free to Begonia, Cycad and Orchid Guild Members

7 – 8 pm lecture, Q&A to follow

The Conservatory galleries will be open at 6:30 to view Wicked Plants: Botanical Rogues & Assassins and to enjoy light refreshments. 

Register Now! Space is limited. Purchase your seat securely online, or register and select the option to pay at the door.

STUMP THE SPEAKER!

Join us in a round of Stump the Speaker! Please send in up to 5 photos each that we will show to Billy unrehearsed after his presentation.  Together, we will vote on the most outrageous, and winners will get a roll of Billy's Crime Scene Investigation barricade tape.   Send us the best (worst) examples of crimes against horticulture, pruning and shaping of plants that are misshapen, hideous, bone-headed, ignorant, unsustainable, and eco-angry examples of landscaping.  Let's surprise Billy with horrors of our own, not just the ones that already disgust him on his flickr site or Facebook page!  

 Upload your photos to http://www.flickr.com/groups/plantcrimes. For those who aren’t flickr members, email photos to crimes@photobotanic.com, with your name, and Photobotanic will upload them to the group, with your name in the description. Please limit photos to 1 MG or 2048 pixels wide.

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EVENING

 “Cupcakes are all the rage, so why not decorate your bougainvilleas with DayGlo icing?”

 

 

Lavender Aromatherapy: “What better way to leave daily stress behind than by sculpting your French lavender into an aromatherapy BarcaLounger?”

“That was too much fun. I thought there’d be a two-drink cover charge for the entertainment,” is a typical response to one of Billy Goodnick’s presentations. “And I learned a lot, too.”

Billy Goodnick has been honing his mantra of “beautiful, useful, sustainable gardens” for decades. As an award-winning designer who worked his way up from swinging a pick to landscape architect, his talks are enriched by decades of professional practice. He has taught TV audiences, master gardeners, homeowners, and college students to design like pros, while instilling a message of planet-friendly practices. To combat the effects of listening to a speaker in a dimly lit room, Billy turns on his stand-up comic timing and hipster attitude to keep his audience tuned in and laughing.

In his past life, Billy was an LA studio and touring drummer who innocently entered the plant world while following his passion for bonsai and Japanese gardens. After one too many 50,000-mile national tours, he experienced his premature midlife crisis, dropped his drumsticks (making a terrible racket) and headed off to study horticulture. His green industry career started by making terrariums for a florist, but quickly rose to retail nursery sales, landscape maintenance and construction, culminating in a twenty-two-year stint as city landscape architect for the City of Santa Barbara.

In recent years he discovered his gift for writing. After lonely nights of blogging, he was offered a gig writing about gardens for local magazines, and hired to blog for a Santa Barbara-based info-tainment website. In 2009, his blog was noticed by Fine Gardening Magazine, proving conclusively that Twitter is not a waste of time. His Sustainable Landscaping: Cool Green Gardens by Billy Goodnick [http://www.finegardening.com/blog//sustainable-landscaping] blog continues to bring his hip, West Coast, sustainable message to a national audience.

They must really like this guy, because in spring 2011, Billy debuted as Fine Gardening Magazine’s newest contributing editor with his Design Workshop column, solving common design problems encountered by garden owners. Billy is a founding member of the Lawn Reform Coalition [www.lawnreform.org], a national group of garden communicators working to end the siren song of the “perfect” lawn. He also co-writes and co-hosts the popular regional television show, Garden Wise Guys, and has appeared on Growing A Greener World, a national public television show, presenting his Crimes Against Horticulture view of the world.

Billy still pounds on his drums with a popular Santa Barbara area rock ‘n roll band, King Bee [www.kingbeesb.com]. He has been married to the world’s best cookie maker, Lin, for 25 years and has a 21-year-old son, Benjamin Cosmo, who shares his dad’s talent for music and words. Biff the Wonder Spaniel completes the family tree, though is sometimes seen lifting his leg on it.